The weakest part of the Windows Live Wave 3 is probably the offerings for Windows Mobile, they are nearly all only web based services with few applications on the phone. There has been very little mentioned or hinted by anyone as to what improvements there could be for the newest wave and for Windows Mobile 6.5 however there are a few ideas I have of what we might end up seeing.
There has been a lot of talk from Microsoft about how much they want to push the newly branded Windows Phones and to compete in the mobile market they know they need the ecosystem and the applications to compete with Apple. One way they are doing this is by including their own Marketplace to allow users to find and install applications on their phone easily. Surely this is a great place for Microsoft to showcase some of its own software for their phone and really push Windows Live onto the mobile market. Would be silly of Microsoft to not have their own applications for some of their best services. We have seen how good some applications can be working with online services, like the Facebook for Windows Mobile application.
Another interesting aspect of the new Mobile Operating System are widgets which are applications written using web languages. As I said earlier most of the Windows Live services on Windows Phones is only through the browser so perhaps it would make sense to use the widgets platform to incorporate some of the Windows Live services on the phones rather than running applications. I would also hope to see more functional mobile web pages for the services, especially as the browser in Windows Mobile 6.5 has been seriously updated, which again would encourage more people to use the suite.
As hardware improves it makes sense that the software becomes more powerful to match and I don’t just mean the operating system, surely it would be useful to have a simple photo editing application for camera phones (and maybe even a video editing tool) with a quick way to upload the photos to the Windows Live service. The Windows Live Mail integration is already reasonable on Windows Mobile, but then emails aren’t anything new. I would, however, like to see better integration between the contacts database and Windows Live People, users shouldn’t have to install anything to link the two. SkyDrive would be very beneficial to have integrated with a phone due to many phones having limited space to store file and why by an expansion memory card if you can just upload things to the internet. I think messenger is reasonable on Windows Mobile too, but I think to have a single application that can do more than just basic conversations is needed in the next Wave.
I would love to see more time, effort and thought put into the next set of releases for Windows Phones as they can really benefit from having a Windows Live application to allow people to easily and simply get the most from their phones, just like people are able to get much more from their PC when using Windows Live.
